An Open Letter / Statue of The Honorable Jefferson Davis at Tredegar Iron works

Dear Grif,

I was just recently made privy to an article written by a young lady by the name of Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan, who writes for a newspaper called The Herald Sun out of Durham, N.C.. Ms. Vaughan’s article began as an intention to highlight the injustice served on a Black man who had been wrongly imprisoned for murder for some 14 years. However, the article quickly became anti-Southern , and absolutely targeting the Southern Cross. I quote her here:” Racism is a sickening phenomenon in this country, one I was only peripherally aware of until I went to college in southwestern Virginia after living the previous seven years in the Washington, D.C. area. It was in the Southern tip of the Old Dominion that I was confronted with my first rebel flag, the Confederate battle flag, as a decoration. I was horrified. More shocking was that other people regarded it as something that just was. I lived at Ft. Bragg and in Augusta, GA., as a kid but I guess I never notice it until I was grown and knew what it represented. Don’t give me that garbage about heritage. It is a flag carried into battle to break up our country. It is the flag trotted out by the KKK during the civil-rights movement to remind the African Americans of Dixie. When I see a rebel flag I associate it with an ignorant person, and stirrings of anger rumble inside me.”

I only mention Ms. Vaughan’s article because it is indicative of the biased axioms that Northern controlled media present to the public that they know full well to be factious. Ms. Vaughan’s targeting of the beloved Commonwealth of Virginia could not have served her masters more, for it comes at a time when one of the greatest acts of reconciliation is taken place at the Tredegar Iron works in Richmond. I speak of the statue of the Honorable President Jefferson Davis that will soon be placed on the grounds there. I can only hope that Ms. Vaughan and others who present the calumny that she does , will go to Tredegar and gaze upon the truth. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and the picture of little Jim Limber, the young slave boy that President Davis and his wife saved from a terrible life threatening beating that he was being subjected to, and furthermore bringing him into their home and treating him as he were their very own son. This monument adequately depicts not only the integrity of an honorable American, but is also a conveyance of the essence of the love Southern people had for a man he saw as family and friend, not what Harriet Beecher Stowe and Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan writes about designed just like it was in the period of so called Reconstruction ; to push that love asunder. God bless the Board of Directors of Tredegar for making a positive step to right a terrible wrong that continues to besiege the memory and honor of our Commanding Chief, the soldiers he commanded, our honorable flag and the millions living and dead, Red, Yellow, Black and White who loved and love it. It is history, heritage not hate; it is the inspiration of valor from the past ! If ever the Nobel peace Prize should be awarded, those responsible for this act at Tredegar should be in line.